The Split Summon: Two Souls, One Body

by Tim Underwood

A new life, a new chance to make a difference. Dead after being hit by a van. Then not dead. Isaac had wanted to help other people and do as much good as he could when he was alive in our world. Now that he had woken up in the body of a powerful cultivator in a fantasy world filled with kilometer long dragons, mountains twice as high as Everest, and an immortal wizard emperor who'd built a giant floating volcano, he still wanted to do as much good as he could. Unfortunately figuring out what is the best thing to do, especially when everything potential has unintended consequences is hard. And then it turned out that the profound soul cultivator whose body Isaac had woken up in still was alive, and he still had control of the body half of the time, and he mainly wanted to die heroically and bravely in a doomed battle to defend his island homeland and the giant dragons that his people had lived peacefully with for thousands of years against that immortal wizard emperor with his floating volcano and army of powerful cultivators. He would never give up fighting against the emperor, because the emperor had killed his family. But Isaac really didn’t want to be part of this fight, because he really didn’t want to die again. I’m trying to promote the idea that most of us should both donate more money to improve the world, and to make sure we are donating to the most effective or useful causes in a fun and fictional context, and I received support from an Effective Altruist organization to help me write this novel.

399 pages, Paperback

Published January 24, 2023

Reviews

[Aaron Gertler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the first work of EA isekai, but perhaps the first original-universe isekai written from an orthodox EA perspective. (Rather than just taking someone with EA-flavored intuitions and watching them adapt to their circumstances, this book has the MC try to start Giving What We Can in a refugee camp — and succeed.) As a collector of ratfic microgenres, and the person who ran the EA Forum's 2021 fiction contest, I was intrigued.

The story was good: I cared enough to finish despite the book's many weaknesses. The philosophy slowed things down, but was easy to skim through without missing critical plot points.

I found the EA philosophy chats clunky, and often wildly out of place (who brings up insect welfare when war is raging?). But that part was at least realistic to the EA community — people love to bring up their favorite talking points at weird times.

The world itself worked as a background — above-average progression fantasy, though that's a low bar to clear. I enjoyed that all war took place in the form of rods from God. Any fight scene that didn't involve throwing heavy objects from the atmosphere was hard to follow, but there weren't many of those.

The characters were mostly one-note; the most interesting one (the villain) had more notes, but they buried under his irritating voice. The ancient dragons didn't feel ancient, and the elder cultivators didn't sound wise. But writing very old characters convincingly is one of the hardest things a writer can do, and many old writers still fail the test (as in Stephen King's Gwendy trilogy).

Massive credit to Tim for taking the time to produce something without much commercial appeal, for the sake of trying to communicate important ideas. I'd love to see many more such experiments, and I haven't found the discipline to create one myself — a critic's job is easy.